My Weather Station: A Synopsis

Here is a quick write up about my weather station. There is another article covering much more technicalities of WeeWx, BelcherTown Theme and it’s real time stuff.

You can view the weather station here: https://weewx.potatoforinter.net/

The physical weather station is a Davis Vantage Pro2+ Wireless. Bought it on Amazon for just under 1000 USD, 990 to be exact… but still, a deal is a deal when it comes to the actual list price of it just being under 1400 USD!! This weather station is effectively “the works” from Davis Instruments before jumping the price tier into the tried-and-true professional hardware used in the field.

What does this weather station monitor for, log, do, report?! It monitors and reports the following details: Air temperature, dew point, solar/sun intensity, UV Sensor, rain gauge, and anemometer (wind speed) with wind vane (direction). All of this is reported to the Davis Vantage Weather Console, the weather console further transfers data in a ‘loop packet’ and ‘one minute archives’ to a mySQL Database.

This weather station also reports to the National Weather Service via the MADIS network via the CWOP system. You can view current and some recent historical data here. It’s been reporting data since Fall 2016, and still going strong. In summer of 2018, the weather station was re-installed with a better foundation, support, and taller pole for the anemometer.

A bit more detail…

It’s worth noting that the weather station runs on WeeWx, http://www.weewx.com/

This software is effectively something that goes along the lines of “do all the things!”. It collects/polls momentary data from the Davis Console, it pulls in real time/loop data from the console, it outputs static and dynamic data to the web page linked at the top. It also stores all of the data in a mySQL database on another machine here in the house.

The more difficult portions of WeeWx was actually getting BelcherTown Template/Theme with the real time data flows functional! Just about everything else on WeeWx has been fairly simple and straightforward. More on that in another article!

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
5 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Rob Wolff
6 September 2022 9:53 am

I’m looking to mount a Davis Vantage Pro2 and really like how you’ve done yours. How high is your anemometer? What kind of pole did you mount it to? How did you mount the pole to the post?